These are the most popular wedding songs in America — and the ones your state loves

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Bruno Mars, center, has four of the 100 most popular songs on Spotify wedding playlists. (Brad Barket/Getty Images for Bruno Mars)

ByBen Zauzmer

September 20, 2017

Welcome to Wedding Guest Wednesday, a feature in which Solo-ish explores the joys and woes of attending other people’s weddings. Because it’s not all about the happy couple — it’s a big day for guests as well.

“Marry Me” or “Marry You”? “Can’t Stop the Feeling” or “I Gotta Feeling”? “Lucky” or “Get Lucky”? If you’re putting together a wedding playlist, the choices are endless. But if you’d like to know what others across the country are picking, help has arrived. Spotify and the author of its Insights blog, Eliot Van Buskirk, were kind enough to share data with us on all the wedding playlists made by users since the service started in 2008.

Let’s start with the most basic question: Which songs are most frequently included on wedding playlists in the United States?

Ed Sheeran’s “Thinking Out Loud” beats Bruno Mars’s “Marry You” for the top spot. But if we expand the list from Top 10 to Top 100, Mars surges ahead. While “Thinking Out Loud” is Sheeran’s only hit on the 100 most-played wedding songs, Mars has three more outside the 10, thanks to “Just the Way You Are” (46th overall), “Treasure” (65th) and “Locked Out of Heaven” (89th).

Doc Vincent, a West Virginia-based DJ who has worked at weddings for 28 years, said that when he’s DJ-ing a ceremony, many couples have asked him to play “Marry You” when they’re exiting during the processional. “People are becoming more modern and unique. Not everyone’s getting married in a church,” he said.

Modern weddings are partial to modern music, but they don’t completely forget the past. One out of every 13 songs on the top 1,000 wedding hits was performed by one of the following artists: Michael Jackson, Queen, Frank Sinatra, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Madonna, Elvis, Otis Redding, the Beach Boys or the Beatles.

Of all the songs released before this decade, none checks in higher than Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)” at No. 5. It’s also the most popular wedding song for Spotify playlists built in D.C.

The lists of top wedding songs in each state tend to look similar. But more informative is which song is the most uniquely popular in each state. Here’s how we get that bit of info: For every song in each state’s top 500 wedding songs, we subtracted the song’s rank in that state from the song’s rank nationwide to find the song with the biggest gap between the two.

Some of these songs are hardly surprising. New Jersey weddings feature disproportionate runs of “Born to Run” by Bruce Springsteen. South Carolina girls and guys get married to “Carolina Girls” by General Johnson and the Chairman of the Board. In Texas, they like “She Likes Texas” by the Josh Abbott Band.

California loves “California Love” by 2Pac. Christina Flamer, a California-based wedding DJ who goes by Christina Flame professionally, says, “The No. 1 thing that cracks me up every time is that even couples who say they don’t like rap get into it. They all love ‘California Love.’”

And of course, what West Virginia gathering would be complete without John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads”? When Vincent, the West Virginia DJ, was asked for the wedding song unique to his home state, despite not being shown this data, he immediately confirmed Spotify’s answer: “Almost 99.9 percent of weddings I do finish with ‘Country Roads.’ It’s the unofficial theme song of West Virginia. The same thing happens: Last song of the night, the bride and groom go to the middle, everyone gathers around them, and they sing ‘Country Roads.’”

But the most notable geographic disparity is on “Fishin’ in the Dark.” A hub of seven states from Montana to Iowa all put the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band country tune in the top 200, yet the song fails to crack the top 1,000 nationwide:

All states with “Fishin’ in the Dark” among their top 500 wedding songs are included in the map above. The higher up on the list, the darker the shading.

This isn’t to say that “Fishin’ in the Dark” is entirely forgotten outside that region. Nashville DJ Jake Burton said that in Tennessee, he’s played “Wagon Wheel” often, but he also mentioned that “Fishin’ in the Dark” “is especially popular with brides and grooms that like country music.”

“I think that the end of the song makes it for the crowd,” he added. “It goes into a double-time feel and then it ends with a sudden climax. It also helps that everyone can sing along.”

“Fishin’ in the Dark” isn’t the only regional preference this data illuminates. Consider the popularity map for “Wop” by J. Dash, featuring Flo Rida, a mainstay of southern weddings:

In the Northeast, there’s a strong preference for “American Girl” by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

Out west, couples are more likely to hear José González’s “Heartbeats” before setting off on their honeymoons.

What this data doesn’t capture are regional differences within states. As Flamer, the California DJ, noticed, “In Northern California, they want to be unique. They’ll get upset when I play Top 40 music. In L.A., they want to hear what’s cool right now.”

Whether Vincent is at home in West Virginia or traveling to Pittsburgh, Baltimore or New York for work, he encounters a couple of the same very popular first-dance selections. “‘Thinking Out Loud’ is a really, really big one. Etta James’s ‘At Last’ has popped up quite a few times.” Sure enough, both of those crack the top four songs contained in the most Spotify playlists labeled “First Dance”:

The top 100 first-dance songs tend to be slower than the top 100 wedding songs overall based on their beats per minute, but some include a quick beat underneath more measured lyrics. As a good example, listen to Otis Redding’s “These Arms of Mine.” It’s clearly written for a slow dance, but if you tap along to the beat, you’ll find yourself rapidly making three taps per second. More precisely, it clocks in at 177 beats per minute, the highest BPM any top-100 first-dance song.

None of this is meant to suggest that anyone should craft a wedding playlist based on the preferences of others. Songs, like weddings, are personal, and different music conjures different emotions for each of us. For instance: You may have noticed that I listed the top 12 first-dance songs instead of a more traditional top 10. I couldn’t help sneaking in No. 12, Elvis’s “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” as that was my parents’ first-dance selection. Hopefully, for those of you soon-to-be-newlyweds engaged in these decisions, this data will provide some ideas for composing your own wedding memories.